Svetomech wrote:UPD: I never tested OpenMW on my more powerful machine, but your post just made me do it. And, as expected, I got constant 60 FPS no matter the location with all in-game settings maxed out (no editing of config files - is that what you did?). My specs below (nevermind the language, they are still understandable).

This is pretty weird. I've recently been playing OpenMW 0.40 (All the way to the end, so I have plenty of in-game experience) and my beefier PC couldn't hold up that well at all.
I turned off water shaders, anti-aliasing all together and still betweenn 300fps indoors and sometimes crawling 30-40 fps outdoors and when its raining sometimes dips down to about 10-20 fps.
I just thought those weird hiccups were just part of the engine at this early time but seems I was wrong.
Where lies the problem then? Is AMD not that well supported?

Nyard wrote:
This is pretty weird. I've recently been playing OpenMW 0.40 (All the way to the end, so I have plenty of in-game experience) and my beefier PC couldn't hold up that well at all.
I turned off water shaders, anti-aliasing all together and still betweenn 300fps indoors and sometimes crawling 30-40 fps outdoors and when its raining sometimes dips down to about 10-20 fps.
I just thought those weird hiccups were just part of the engine at this early time but seems I was wrong.
Where lies the problem then? Is AMD not that well supported?

Do you use a clean installation of OpenMW? Any mods or other alterations to the software? What about increased view/render distance?
Have you checked the console or log files for any warning or error messages? We also had problems with the physics drastically decreasing frame rates because of collision handling. Use F3 in-game to switch through the logging modes and post any oddities you can spot.

Atahualpa wrote:Well, maybe it's an AMD thing after all. Wouldn't be the first time.

I have an AMD card too, but unless I have the water shader on I don't ever recall dropping below 40fps.

Using the open source drivers? On Windows you need to use AMD's drivers, and AMD's OpenGL support has always been relatively poor.

I tried both the open source ones, and the AMD ones. I can't give an apples-to-apples comparison of the two because I had Vsync on when I was using the open source drivers, but I can say that both never dipped below 40fps (without water shaders).

Atahualpa wrote:Well, maybe it's an AMD thing after all. Wouldn't be the first time.

I have an AMD card too, but unless I have the water shader on I don't ever recall dropping below 40fps.

Using the open source drivers? On Windows you need to use AMD's drivers, and AMD's OpenGL support has always been relatively poor.

I tried both the open source ones, and the AMD ones. I can't give an apples-to-apples comparison of the two because I had Vsync on when I was using the open source drivers, but I can say that both never dipped below 40fps (without water shaders).

I'm using AMD on Windows and with the water shader on the my frame rate is cut in half. In parts of Balmora it drops as low as 10fps.

This is on a really good rig as well. AMD's Opengl performance is really bad i guess. If I have to guess they do game specific optimization for Opengl. Witch OpenMW doesn't get obviously.

Nah, it's the shader. Sometimes it triggers CPU (and occasionally GPU) bottleneck — when you have the shader enabled, the scene is basically rendered twice. So if you have weak CPU, your FPS would be exactly the half of one you had before. Or perhaps weak GPU. I may have mixed something, but it's something like that.

Atahualpa wrote:
Do you use a clean installation of OpenMW? Any mods or other alterations to the software? What about increased view/render distance?

I seem to have found the culprit. It's the Morrowind Rebirth Mod. I would never have guessed. It basically just changed the world, it's not like it draws more geometry or alters the rendering but the mod sure as hell halves my framerate.
I tested it for a bit in Ebonheart and disabling Morrowind Rebirth resulted in a stable >60fps framerate.

But I think the other are right about AMD having bad OpenGL. Oh well what can you do. At least it's 60 now, or at least - will be when I will be playing Morrowind the next time. (Hopefully by then theres another handful of OpenMW versions out that improve performance and introduce higher draw distances)

I think there's a known issue with how the collision system behaves with Morrowind Rebirth's meshes. Sometimes an NPC wanders vaguely near something, or a bottle is placed a little too close to a table, and the framerate tanks. There are a few similar issues even with vanilla meshes, so it's possible that a fix will come along once someone figures out why Bullet is sometimes being slower than the original engine.

I've been playing drums, guitar and have been singing since I was a kid, so I'm kind of a music geek. For a long time I've planned to build a new PC dedicated to recording music (and, just to give myself headaches, I'm going to use linux with Ardour for it even though the hardware support is next to zero). Since I don't want to get computer noise in the microphones, I wanted as much silence as I could get.

Well, today I built and installed that PC. It uses a Streacom FC9 case (the one without an optical slot), which means that it is totally passively cooled. 0 dB of computer noise is of course a bit overkill, but you know... It's fun! The specs are as follows:

Intel Core i5 6600T 2.7 GHz 35 W (35W is great for this because of the passive cooling)
Graphics is only handled by the processor, no dedicated
16 GB RAM
120 GB ssd (I used one I had since before, will probably buy a bigger one later)

So, to try both the temps and the performance, I installed OpenMW right away.

Ok, so after adding a bunch of mods, with my own texture packs included, my fps went from the previous 60-100 to 35-45 in Seyda Neen. Still fully playable in my opinion. I'm impressed by how much the Intel graphics can handle, considering it's only a TDP of 35W.